Kiva's Flat,Flat World: Ten Years of Microcredit in Cyberspace

While microcredit has been widely praised as a new, powerful tool for enabling development and empowering the poor, this form of ‘development from below’ does not exist in a vacuum. Rather, microcredit programs are inseperable from a host of neoliberal political, cultural, and economic practices and projects. These contexts are, however, systematically missing from Kiva.org, the largest and most popular peer-to-peer microlending portal. Instead, Kiva.org presents a placeless perspective on development and poverty, where borrowers’ skin color, native dress, and picturesque backgrounds seem to vary, but the ‘fix’ of microcredit remains universal. This ‘flat’ approach is problematic for two reasons. First, Kiva.org naturalizes the financialization of poor people's disadvantage in the coercive form of debt. Second, lenders are encouraged to channel their desire to help alleviate poverty through Kiva.org's lending portal based on an illusory sense of connection, transparency and beneficence in lending, thus potentially displacing other forms of less problematic development aid and intervention.